Downloaded and installed on a 2009 Mac Mini running Lion (10.7), all trouble free. Like the new features in Finder and Safari especially

Doesn't look like I am seeing free upgrades to numbers, pages, iPhoto - all quite ancient though from iLife 08/09 - have a link (via MacRumours forum) for a free iWork9 trial which is then upgradable for free, will keep you posted if that works

thekingisdead - Member
Just installing mine now. How come its free? The cynic in me is struggling to understand such a move....

Free because there's not much shiny stuff. Joe Bloggs Public don't understand improvements they can't see. So all the performance and power stuff just by-passes most. Apple have obviously decided they'd rather give it away, and therefore get maximum adoption, and then reap the benefits of people having fast(er), and more efficient Macs, rather than making a few more quid.

The next release will probably cost, because it's likely to be a shiny chrome-filled redesign of the UI in keeping with iOS7.

Just installing mine now. How come its free? The cynic in me is struggling to understand such a move....

Few years ago Apple dropped the prices of their machines in an attempt to take market share off Microsoft, and succeeded to a degree.

People new to Mac's then moaned about the high price of software too.

Apple crept the prices of machines back up, and reduced the software costs. Nobody noticed the additional £100 per machine, but everyone was ecstatic they can now update to the new OS for very little money.

The release of 10.9 onto the world for "free" comes only a few weeks after Apple put the prices of some of its base machines up by £50 (or more) again... To be fair, I know I sound cynical right now, but I understand why they do it. If you want to buy a shiny new iMac, the fact that a month ago it was £1099 and now it's £1149 isn't going to concern you in the slightest, but if you had to pay £20 for the latest OS only a few months after you'd bought the machine you'd be annoyed!

This way, as stated above, everyone will adopt quicker meaning they can drop support for older OS's much sooner. I've been running 10.6.8 on my hack, and 10.7.5 on my laptop cos I didn't want to pay to upgrade to mountain lion when I saw (for me) no benefit. As 10.9 is free, providing its stable then I'll be on it pretty soon.

This SSD issue - is it a case of if Mavericks installs without borking it then it's fine?
All working fine here since installing, downloaded the firmware tool but it won't run as 'unsupported on your system'.
Would quite like to find out if it's going to implode on me as it's nearly 2 years old so warranty almost up!

There us a three year replacement plan on the SSD irrespective of warranty.

And as for apps - you do all know you can set what spaces they open in don't you? Just open the application, drag it to the space you want then right click on the app shortcut in the dock and choose to 'always open in this space'

Look at the lauchpad icon in the dock, it'll have a progress bar and if you hover over it it'll tell you downloaded/total file size.

Well I think I'm downloading it, there is no progress bar and no indication in App Store that anything is happening. I did reboot and a small Icon appeared in the task bar (round with an X on it) and then promptly vanished completely....

The purchases section of App Store endlessly says 'Download' no matter how many times I click on it.

zokes » Rather offset by this though, surely:
No, I fail to see how Australian wages being higher than those in the US affects how much it costs to distribute apple hardware over here to the tune of 33%.
Anyway, prices for the UK are out now - looks like you're being even more shafted than us.

Official government advice on software is to buy from outside Oz
We track ours to the US$ anyway we actually pass on the savings when the Au$ is strong too!

Downloaded it yesterday to my 2007 iMac with no issues. Strange goings on in the app store though - iPhoto didn't appear on the "updates" list but on the app store page for iPhoto it let me install the latest version for free, whereas it seems to want me to pay £10 or so to update Pages. Garageband says it will install the latest version for free but the download keeps on failing.

MrsBouys attempts at updates for her Mac and My Air failed, in fact she baulked at the download time for her Mac and called Apple, they said "don't download it, we've got a few issues our end, best wait a week or two"
Excellent, you lot have the Beta versions... Phah

I've updated 3 machines now, a 2-3 year old MBP, a 2 month old Macbook Air and a 3 year old iMac. For some reason the MBP took several hours to re-install (even though the progress bar said 39 minutes). The older iMac took about 30 mins. All the downloads were really slow and happened over night.

Only problem I've got so far is the Mail client will no longer connect to my email provider, but I've not had time to figure out why.....